Why I don’t like awards

Always remember: Someone else’s success is not your failure.

A few years ago, I won a poster prize at a conference in Hamburg (Germany). Obviously, I was honored to receive this award and get some credit for my work. But I also reflected on the other participants in the room. During the poster sessions, I had seen many interesting and well-made posters. Some of them certainly deserved an award as well. I could imagine that some participants were thinking the same: why did this poster win an award, while that one didn’t?

We cannot help but compare our work – and ourselves – to others. This experience made me reflect on the value of awards. And why I don’t like them.

The winners (including me in the middle) of the poster prizes at the Hybrid Symposium (2019) in Hamburg.

Luck and Talent

Let me start with an important disclaimer. Most awards are well-deserved. I do not want to downgrade the accomplishments of other people. I just want to explore the unintended side-effects of handing out awards.

My main concerns is that for every winner, there are countless “losers”. When someone receives an award, you might start doubting yourself. This mostly happens when you were also eligible for the award (you probably won’t experience these feelings when the Nobel Prizes are announced). You might ask yourself the question: Why them and not me?

Seeing someone else getting an award often highlights your own shortcomings. You might start comparing yourself with the winner and overthinking the situation. What could I do better? In most cases, however, it is impossible to pinpoint the exact reason why someone received the award. Generally, winning an award is a combination of many factors some of which are unrelated to skill, such as luck and politics. Indeed, a recent study – which was ironically awarded an IgNobel Prize – showed that success is often more due to luck than talent.

The realization that luck plays such a big role can help to control the feelings of self-doubt. But more importantly, you should always keep in mind that someone else’s success is not your failure.

Self-promotion

As I mentioned above, most awards are well-deserved. Occasionally, however, you come across an unfair winner. This can be frustrating, but understanding the underlying cause can help to soften the blow.

I would argue that our society’s obsession with attention is partly to blame. Some people receive awards because they are good at self-promotion instead of producing quality. Moreover, people that are very visible – for example on social media – attract more attention than people that do (often amazing) work behind the scenes. Who has the highest chances of receiving an award?

The development of an attention-focused society bothers me. And I am afraid that it will continue to grow as more people try to get their “five second of fame” on TikTok or Instagram. The quality of the content will go down, but we will keep rewarding it.

People that are good at self-promotion might have a higher chance of winning awards.

What can we do about it?

The previous section might sound pessimistic, but I still have hope. All is not lost. I would like to end this blog post with some tips to reduce the negative impact of awards.

• As I already wrote: Someone else’s success is not your failure. Always keep this in mind.
• Spend less time on social media and avoid accounts that can trigger frustration or self-doubt (I have, for example, blocked several Twitter-accounts that annoy me).
• Compliment each other more (something we apparently struggle with, see this Flemish article). We don’t need to give each other fancy awards to feel appreciated.

And of course, most of us don’t do it for the awards. The majority of people do what they do because they love it. An occasional award is a nice token of appreciation, but it is not the end goal.